I Come To The Garden Alone...

There is a longing in me right now for an Ebenezer stone—

the kind raised in 1 Samuel 7:12, where the people of God could finally say, “Thus far the Lord has helped us.”

But I don’t have a stone yet.

What I have is a garden.

In the Garden of Gethsemane,

Jesus Christ did not offer polished prayers.

He offered honest ones.

“If it is possible, let this cup pass from me…”

And I am beginning to understand that kind of prayer.

Because lately, I have cried in a way I had forgotten was even possible.

Not quiet tears.

Not controlled emotion.

But deep, body-wracking sobs that come from somewhere far beneath the surface—

a place I learned, a long time ago, how to seal off.

For years, I have lived in survival mode.

There was no time to feel.

No space to process.

Grief was something I carried, but never unpacked.

And now, in the middle of broken pipes, broken cars, and a breaking capacity to hold it all together…

it’s like something in me has given way.

The grief isn’t neat.

It isn’t convenient.

It doesn’t wait for private moments.

It comes like a tidal wave—

unexpected, overwhelming, and honestly… embarrassing.

And yet—

I am starting to see that this breaking is not the absence of God.

It might actually be His kindness.

Because what if this is what it looks like to finally grieve?

What if the tears I am trying to contain

are the very thing God is using to heal what I never had the chance to feel?

And even more surprising—

in these moments where I am undone, where I feel like a heap of emotions on the floor—

people keep showing up.

Not with quick fixes.

Not with easy answers.

But with presence.

With help.

With kindness.

With tangible reminders that I am not alone.

And if I’m honest… this kind of love feels unfamiliar to me.

I don’t have a strong reference point for it.

But something in me recognizes it anyway.

This is Jesus.

This is what it looks like when heaven draws near through people.

This is what it looks like to be held when you no longer have the strength to hold yourself together.

There’s an old hymn—In the Garden—that has lived quietly in me since childhood.

I remember feeling something in it even then—

something in the minor chords,

something tender and almost aching—

but I didn’t have the language for it.

I do now.

It was longing.

It was nearness.

It was the quiet kind of love that meets you in places you don’t yet understand.

I used to think that kind of closeness with God belonged to peaceful moments—

to calm mornings and settled hearts.

But now I am finding it here.

In the mess.

In the tears.

In the unraveling.

Not because everything is okay,

but because He is here.

Maybe the Ebenezer stone isn’t waiting on the other side of this.

Maybe it’s already forming—

not as a monument to everything going right,

but as a testimony to what God is doing in me while everything feels like it’s falling apart.

Maybe the stone will say:

Here, I learned how to grieve.

Here, I learned that it was safe to feel.

Here, I discovered that even in crisis, I was not alone.

Here, I began to trust that God was holding what I could not.

I still don’t have the ending to this story.

But I am beginning to see that the space before the stone

is not empty.

It is sacred.

Because the same God who meets us at the stone

meets us in the garden.

And He does not turn away

from our tears.

And maybe this is what that old hymn was trying to teach me all along—

“And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.”